I awakened from the trance years ago. I’m sure if I dug up my journals I could find the precise date for you. It was when I first experienced “the Void.” I believe it was in 2020. I was getting my coaching certification to become a Sex, Love, and Relationship Coach — something I never imagined myself being, but there I was being it. Four years before that, I was depressed at one of the top 5 universities in the country meeting with a “religious advisor” from an on-campus faith group and wondering if I were to end up 40 and single like her, would it even be so bad? (40 is how old I imagined her to be at the time, though now I suspect she was a lot younger.) 

And so the year was 2020 and I was experiencing yet another failed talking phase with a guy from Brooklyn who was into sacred geometry, only ate fruit (literally), and gave me the best cunnilingus I’d ever had. (Btw dude from Brooklyn? The title is still yours.) It would take another three years before I learned about narcissism and then another two before I realized I had endured scapegoat abuse my whole life. I was a newbie coach, but had long held the title of “wise beyond her years.” I felt feelings sharply and got cagey in relationships when my “spidey” senses began to tingle. (If only they tingled before I was emotionally hooked, but alas, at least my trauma didn’t leave me completely shutdown.) 

I didn’t know why at the time, but every dating fail left me in an existential crisis. I’d been abandoned so many times in my life and in so many different ways that, despite all my awareness, I didn’t even self-identify as having abandonment issues. On the contrary, like many young Black girls, I was taught to be both strong and independent… and simultaneously completely and utterly outwardly focused and codependent. This means I was telling myself I chose to be alone. I didn’t see how whilst I sought to offer safety to everyone around me, there was no one for me to come home to in any of my relationships… There were no safe relationships where I could release the bonds of servitude and just be… It’s harder to see our wounds when the tale spun around us says differently. We self-indoctrinate…

But I remember this older guy from NYC. I remember feeling seen. 

Then, I made a mistake that just about every baby coach makes. I tried to offer him insight. Coaches shouldn’t coach friends or loved ones. I knew this rule. I obeyed this rule. But on what would later be our final date, my codependency was activated and there I was meditating with this dreamy guy after some of the best sex I’d ever had. I remember wishing that date could last all week long. He felt safe. I felt safe. I wanted to be safe for him. I told him this wasn’t something I liked to do since coaching creates power imbalances that aren’t healthy in close relationships. He insisted. He was “curious about my work.” (I know. Red flag.) And so I violated my own boundary and, as it turns out, even the most ascended aureate is still a guy from Brooklyn who doesn’t want to hear his date inquiring about his childhood wounds or daddy issues. I was cleaved. I took the many trains home in tears, devastated. What had I said that was so wrong??

Now, as I look back, it was clear who was really playing with power dynamics. My profession was sexy to him, but I wasn’t allowed to tell him something he didn’t already know. With all his assorted symbols and magical medallions from various traditions, he had a monopoly on “secret knowledge.” 

When I got home, after a long conversation in tears with my closest cousin, I let myself finally fall into this abyss I had been running from all my life. It was like a black pit had opened up in my bedroom floor and I let it take me in… 

I let myself go right into the center of the pain. 

It felt like a I was laying in a bed of giant pins, dying.

I couldn’t move. All throughout my back body, I was pierced and skewered…

And then out of the Void I had a thought. 

I’m creating this.

The needles flickered. Then, disappeared. If I thought of the many holes through my back or the suffering I was experiencing moments before, they reappeared. 

So, I took a breath and tried to relax. 

The threatening darkness started to shift. It no longer felt like falling into outer space, watching each radiant star beam flicker off — a feeling I often felt as a kid as I looked up into the night sky in both awe and dread. The Void started to feel warm… welcoming… loving. It was like being held in someone’s chest so tight that you close your eyes and let your body shake… I let the love take me in, melting away a lifetime of feeling utterly alone.

Then… I started to play in the Void. I watched as the Void responded to my thoughts. I thought something… and it appeared! Then, disappeared… I did it again! …And again!

I knew in that moment I had found the secret.

In a rush, I climbed my way back to “reality.” Eager and excited to spread the good news. What I felt instead was the crashing weight of the world around me. I could feel the heaviness of this world, the pain, the suffering… Something had gone terribly wrong. I could feel how dense it was here in the physical plane. I staggered from the weight of the pain. So. Much. Pain. I became scared. I knew I had to be very careful with my thoughts or I would plunge into a deep depression I might not be able to get myself out of. I teetered on this edge for days… Slowly, my body became re-accustomed to the heaviness. My senses and emotions stabilized again and my connection to the Void softened and faded, though I could tell it was always there, on the other side of a veil. 

Odd things happened during this time. Most notably, the website I had been working on for my coaching business suddenly went all black. Things around me disappeared and reappeared. Appearing and dissolving in and out of a void. 

I knew I would one day lead people through this awakening, but I wasn’t ready to do so just yet… I knew I needed to understand more about this experience before I could guide others safely. 

In the years that followed, I would often think of the Void. I could sense that this physical reality was a thin film overlaying the vastness of space. 

I would sometimes visit the Void momentarily during sacred pleasure rituals. Other times, it came to me through synchronicities and gut feelings… but mostly, life went on. I had more terrible dating experiences, but they didn’t break me like they did before. 

I worked on my business. I got certified. I coached. All the while terrified and wondering what in the world I was doing.

December of 2021, in another pit of despair, unsure how I was going to make the money I needed that month, I let myself go into the painful core of fear once again. This time, I wasn’t just met by the Void, but a beingness in the emptiness…

It was as though the internal mirror had turned in on itself and I had a moment of instant recognition. This is me. This is ME. 

Am I the Void??? (This I’ve sensed to be both yes and no.) 

From then on, I’ve recognized there were two selves within me. My ego-mind and what I later named, “the Deeper Self,” though in private, I just called it ME. It’s as if I knew my mind would need the reminder that this is me — and yup, it sure did. 😅

At this point, I was so tired of suffering in my life. It seemed that no matter how hard I worked on my business or my relationships or my body or anythingggg, I was never enough. What I felt in my Deeper Self was a being that was purely being. Not chasing, not efforting, not doing much of anything really, beyond breathing with me and loving me and loving life. It felt like this supremely powerful being that, despite all its power, had no desire to snap its fingers and make anything appear. 

I was scared of what this all meant, but I had also reached my internal limit. The pressures of the outside world be damned, I didn’t want to suffer anymore. I made a commitment to never depart from this beingness again. My desire to be at peace had finally become stronger than my fear. Still, it has taken over three years of meditating, experimenting, and assessing every single day to learn what ME was telling me from the very start: 

Stop. 

Allow the nothingness. 

Allow the Void. 

Allow yourself to be empty.

As spiritual awakenings often go, shit hit the fan big time. Pretty immediately after that transcendent experience, I lost relationships. I witnessed “evil.” I was re-traumatized in my most painful relationships… My passion for conscious intimacy waned and, disillusioned by the reality of narcissistic abuse, I drew inward…

I got hooked on teachings on manifesting, trying to will my Deeper Self to replicate what I experienced in the Void. 

I wrestled with my mind, gave up, and wrestled some more. 

I eventually learned how to communicate with my Deeper Self and then sometimes wished I hadn’t — she’s way too chill about things I think are devastatingly urgent — but in the end, I never really meant any of my fake frustration, because finally I had somewhere safe inside myself to come home to. 

I slowly learned how to give up on narcissists, in my family, in my dating life, in friendship circles… I had grown up in the church and had absorbed that spiritual compassion meant martyring yourself to save others. But as I tuned into my Deeper Self and felt her absolute emptiness towards those I was certain I was meant to “save with my love,” I slowly let go. My mind would then fill the emptiness with anger, indignation, and at times hate and resentment. Then, I’d feel the separation it caused between me and ME and know that wasn’t the way either. So, I gave that up too. 

Our minds want to feel full. 

If it’s not acting out love, then it wants a reason to fill with hate. Busying ourselves with manifestation formulas keeps the mind occupied for a while, but then we lose the plot when things don’t flow exactly the way we want them to and we get absorbed in figuring out what we’re doing wrong.

It’s like our minds can sense that it is encased in that film atop the Void. It knows there’s an aspect of Self that is deeply powerful, but just can’t uncross its wires and get the lights to turn on. 

This is how you uncross those wires and access the cosmic you:

Stop.

Allow the emptiness.

Allow the Void.

Allow yourself to be empty.

Dearest Gentle Reader: This is your re-awakening.

If we haven’t met, I’m Yanique. Certified Intimacy Coach and Spiritual Guide. I’m still figuring out Substack, but ever since I was a little girl I’ve always considered myself a writer, so Substack feels like a good place for me to be. If you would like to explore your sacred depths, here are some places where I play: 

• Private Intimacy Coaching (for all genders, couples coaching re-opening soon)
• PUSSY ACADEMY – My mystery school for feminine mystics (for women)
• Private Coaching to Access Your Deeper Self (for all)
• Mystery Freebie – Tap to find out 💋

Have you experienced the Void? Comment and share your experience below ❤️